Applicability of a new generation of photonic devices in backbone network scenarios

This article presents the characteristics of the transponders and optical nodes developed by the QAMeleon project and illustrates an example of application of these systems in an optical backbone. A scalability study shows how with traffic increasing at a rate of 30% per year, high flexible and spectral efficient QAMeleon devices allow the network to scale to carry all the traffic up to 2030 as long as multiple systems are used in parallel on the most heavily loaded nodal degrees. Scalability extends beyond 2030 with the use of nodes with a greater number of ports and with the possible use of C + L band systems instead of C band only.